My Front Porch

I have decided Facebook is the social equivalent to my parents' front porch when I was little. My reasons:

• both are used at your convenience to pass leisure time pleasantly
• a front porch is public to your neighbors, FB is public to friends.
• when you are on the front porch, you can go back in when you get uncomfortable. On FB you can choose exactly how you present yourself, who sees the information, and even block people from whom you want privacy.
• in both settings you get a general idea of what is going on with acquaintances but it is in rather a hit-or-miss fashion and requires no planning or special effort on your part.
• you can wave or smile from your porch, or hit the like button on FB
• you can talk if it suits you by waving someone up to your porch or patting the swing, or by leaving comments.
• gossip is easy in either setting.
• it is important to remember that although FB asks us to call many people we would just smile to if on our porch "friend" they are more of casual acquaintances.

most porches are friendly and relatively quiet places; but every neighborhood has someone who has ball games going too loud on his radio for children across the street to sleep, and occasionally loud fights start on the porch. At least there they tend to move inside, while on FB they tend to go on and on in comments. I prefer to save strong opinions for my blog, which to me, is more like my living room. When you enter my living room, I think you expect to be on my turf. Don't be surprised if I am opinionated here. :)      
                                            

March for Life 2015

This week we went to DC for the March for Life. It is my first time going and I'm glad to have been there.

There was a huge crowd, maybe half a million. How amazing would it be if the crowd matched the number of babies aborted in America since the decision, currently around 57 million? Inconceivable.

I remember when the Supreme Court passed down the decision. I never thought it could stand, not in America. Boy, was I wrong. I would never have believed this march would still be going on so many years later. I think most people would never have believed abortion would be so common.

But my main reaction was to the women carrying the "I Regret My Abortion" posters. Four of our children came to us by adoption. I saw those signs and was just so glad that my children's birth moms were not carrying one, at least not for my child. And I thought of all the families that did not get to know and love someone as wonderful as my children, whether as their birth family, foster, or adoptive family. So incredibly much loss, and we have done it to ourselves. 

Thoughts on Prepping for a Test

Disclosure: probably more than my usual level of acceptable grossness, but I wanted to keep track of these thoughts for myself.

Today is the day for one of those once-a-decade rather-unpleasant tests we are encouraged to have to avoid colon cancer. And I am ready. Or at least I hope I am.

I feel fairly confident I am clean and ready for the doctor because I followed all the assigned protocol exactly. But I have no way to be sure. Last time I thought I had done well but a bit of vegetable skin lingered behind... less than pristine, despite my sincere efforts. So today when I realized I had no way to be sure, I wondered... is this how the Old Testament saints felt after all their sacrifices? Because even if they had done everything right, they had no way to be sure. Thank God for the coming of Christ, the perfect sacrifice. We can be sure we are clean with God through His Son's blood.

Such a humbling experience, almost like corporate confession of sin. We all know we have that kind of dirt in our lives. We all know each other does. And yet we spend a whole lot of time pretending we have never seen it and being appalled when we do.

Eve, Persephone, and Thanksgiving

Today my usual pomegranate-seeder is on her way to Valparaiso for Thanksgiving so I got this messy but beautiful task myself. (Valparaiso, that's fun to say!)  I have always loved seeing the beautiful arils when you open the plain fruit, they sparkle like cut jewels hidden away inside. 

I have a theory that the pomegranate is the fruit offered to Eve in the garden. I would have taken it, myself. That would also explain how the Persephone story got its start. 

Why do we have pomegranate at Thanksgiving? We cut a pineapple in quarters and then chunk each quarter and replace the pieces in the shell, and set three of them out on a platter. Then we sprinkle with pomegranate seeds. I did this one year because I thought it would be pretty, and my brother announced, "Look, the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria... and some of the pilgrims have been swept overboard." And thus a tradition was born.

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I will give you the treasures of darkness and the hoards in secret places, that you may know that it is I, the LORD, the God of Israel, who call you by your name. ~ Isaiah 45:3

Please Do Not Mention My Housekeeping Skills

Look at this, would ya? I went to check through my random extra spices if I have bulk whole cloves or if they need to go on my shopping list for making orange pomanders. I didn't find any but instead found this bottle of yellow food color, with the lid so so corroded:

So. Not sure what you are thinking but my thoughts ran pretty much like this: Look at how corrosive yellow is. What does that mean about hope? I decided to scratch corrosive for something more positive. What do you think about transformative? I like that one. Hope is transformative. It cannot even be bottled up (think of Pandora, ye random thinkers) but escapes the bottle. I like that.

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apologies for the excessively rambly nature of this entry. Mr Music is reading through Histories of Herodotus and believe me, I stuck to the point by comparison. 

One Moment, Please

Anyone else have a washing machine like this? My washing machine has a countdown timer. Only it is totally erratic... it will rest on 2 minutes for about half an hour... sometimes... and sometimes for only a few seconds from 2 minutes till zero... 

It just may be payback for all the times I tell my dear children, "Just a minute." :P 

Whittington

I want to post book reviews of things as I finish reading them. This one is out of order but it is short and the book is at hand. I picked up a copy of Whittington by Alan Armstrong at one of those "fill a bag for a dollar" sales at our library. Big risk there, huh? It made it into the bag because the cover picture looked, um, interesting.

My copy doesn't have the Newbery seal on it and at first I wasn't sure if it was for adults or children.

It is interesting, though not as I expected. It is a heavy-handed didactic barnyard Charlotte's Web with 16th century lore woven through (the more interesting part to me) and a strong moral lesson on the value of hard work and Learning to Read. 

My favorite parts were a quote near the end which I read aloud at lunch to Devastatingly Handsome and Mr Music, where, IMNEHO, an editor might have been useful: "He went to the side of the ship and untied the blue silk he wore around his neck. He wiped his face and tossed it overboard as a token for the cat." (Mr Music guffawed.) You will be stunned to learn, only a few pages later, that apparently his face was still intact, as we read that the beautiful Mary "touched his face gently, tracing his scar."

The other thing I liked was the listing of sources cited in the endnotes. I appreciate the author's thoroughness in listing everything from 1605 plays (the perfect date to encounter here on November 5th :) ) to The Blue Fairy Book to Robinson Crusoe and Herodotus.